I found salt in Vintage Story
You'll only understand the pain and drama of this if you've played Vintage Story, but: I found salt. Finally. After over one hundred hours of playtime in my save, I found a salt dome in a desert. This is what it looked like when I was wildly celebrating my great achievement:
Vintage Story locks quite a lot of food-related gameplay - cheese, pickling, preserved meats, and the food security that comes with these things - behind salt. But in VS, the only way to acquire salt is to mine halite out of the ground. Halite spawns under strange conditions and cannot be detected using the game's ore-detection tools, because it's a rock, not an ore. Finding it is a source of great misery for many players.
I spent much of my last 100 hours in this save over the last two years searching for halite specifically. This is because I want to be able to make cheese. Cheese is one of the most resource-intensive processes in the game, and it requires not only a domesticated dairy animal - something I haven't accomplished yet - but also needs salt introduced to the process at two separate steps. It is my dream to make cheese in VS. I therefore became maniacally fixated on the salt-location process.
You can assess a unit of land's salt-bearing probability using the ore-detection tool, but you cannot actually locate the halite nodes using that tool, so I wasted a lot of time mining the absolute shit out of regions with high salt likelihoods. In the end, I found salt on a trip deep into the desert. I'd heard that the desert was a good place to find halite. It spawns at the top of a sedimentary rock layer, so it could sometimes be found sticking up above the sand, or hidden immediately beneath the sand, in a pillar or dome-shaped formation.
I took a day-long run away from my base, found a desert I hadn't explored before, shoveled awy the top layer of sand, and immediately found a halite dome. This is the equivalent of stopping by a haystack, grabbing a piece of straw, and getting lucky enough to immediately grab the needle.
I'm now beginning the long and difficult process of kidnapping goats to become my dairy herd. I will accomplish this by scaring the goats into a pit.
I know that most people in ancient times did not experience what I've experienced. Most people were not mining salt to unlock all the salt-related parts of their diet. Vintage Story modders have added the ability to evaporate seawater to make salt as well. But the devs want us to mine it, because mining it is hard, and because this is a game about struggle and misery. I have my prize now, so I'm benevolent and wise and happy. It was all worth it.
I'll check back in once I've made cheese.